Local entrepreneurs quietly celebrate Downtown Eastside improvements

Sisters Winnie (left), Jenny (behind) and Sally (right) with father Leslie Joe at the Sunrise Market in the Downtown Eastside that the family has been running for 50 years.

Photographed by:Steve Bosch, PNG

VANCOUVER -- Amid all the anger and accusations of gentrification swirling around Pidgin, the latest trendy eatery to set up shop in the Downtown Eastside, there runs a distinct undercurrent of support for its owners.

Long-time local entrepreneurs like Sally Joe, whose family owns and operates the Sunrise Market on Powell Street, are quietly welcoming Pidgin and the changes chic shops, cafes and pubs like it are bringing to the neighbourhood.

That the new digs are also bringing with them a previously unheard-of price point hasn’t gone unnoticed.

But these are business people.

They do what they do to make money, and that’s a whole lot easier to accomplish when there are people around who’ve got some to spend.

“Across the street there is ... a high-end butcher shop. I can’t even shop there — the beef tenderloin is about $20 a pound — but I don’t mind. I like to see the area improve so that it is not just all social services,” said Joe.

Pidgin has been the target of community activists ever since opening its doors on Feb. 1 at 350 Abbott Street. Demonstrators have been picketing outside the restaurant to draw attention to what they say is gentrification and encroachment on the only remaining Vancouver community where low-income people feel accepted.

Jean Swanson of the poverty-advocacy group Carnegie Community Action Project said the business, and others like it, have no place in a neighbourhood where hundreds of residents are struggling, and in many cases failing, to keep a roof over their heads.

Rather, businesses like Sunrise Market, known as the cheapest grocery store in the city, are what the community needs, she said.

“Community members can get things that they need and afford, and they are treated with respect and not trailed by security guards, which happens a lot,” she said.

Efforts by some business owners, including those at Pidgin, to integrate into the community by shopping locally and contributing to food and social programs may be well-intentioned, but aren’t the solution, said Swanson.

“People here don’t want charity,” she said.

“If I were (the business owners), I would get it together and hold a news conference and call on (B.C. Housing Minister) Rich Coleman and (Prime Minister) Stephen Harper to build 5,000 units of self-contained social housing. I would ask they raise welfare rates. I would stop trying to make it seem that the situation in the Downtown Eastside can be solved by charity, and get onboard and start working for actual policy changes,” she said.

Pidgin co-owner Brandon Grossutti told The Vancouver Sun in an earlier interview that his restaurant has tried to fit in with the community by hiring local residents, using local laundromat services and buying local art.

Others, like Mark Brand of the high-profile Save On Meats butcher shop and deli, sells sandwich tokens to customers at his Hastings Street business. The tokens are designed to be given to homeless people in the area who can then redeem them for food at the restaurant.

Ruth Meta, a small-business owner and self-described “entrepreneur with a social conscience”, said Grossutti and his business partners should be congratulated for their business venture, not criticized.

“I think that man has done wonders,” she said of the efforts to stimulate economic vibrancy in the Downtown Eastside.

Meta firmly believes the health of a community can be measured by the health of its local business scene.

That was the philosophy behind her successful push to open a laundromat around the corner from Pidgeon Park in 2001. At the time, it was among a handful of “legitimate” businesses operating locally.

“Everything else there was a front for something else,” she said.

Meta isn’t without feeling for the anti-gentrification cause. She raised her daughter in neighbourhood social housing, eking out a living as she struggled to balance her responsibilities as a single mom with her efforts to go back to school and retrain.

“The place really does have a sense of community,” she said.

But the solution to gentrification is not ghettoization, she added. There has to be some middle ground.

“Now there are the condos and new people coming into the neighbourhood who have jobs and they buy locally. Money is circulating more reasonably than it did,” she said.

Wendy de Kruyff said she, too, sympathizes with those fighting against neighbourhood gentrification.

De Kruyff has been operating her independent clothing shop, Dream, on West Cordova for 20 years.

She’s seen the community shift from one filled with artists and non-conformists — people she could count on to shop at her store — to darker periods where crack cocaine and crystal meth ruled the streets, prompting many neighbouring business owners to relocate elsewhere.

She appreciates many of the most-recent changes brought on by the redevelopment of Woodwards and other condo projects.

Yet, at the same time, her rent “just keeps going up and up and up,” while her income hasn’t budged much.

“I don’t know where the people are (shopping) sometimes,” de Kruyff said. “Maybe they are at H&M.”

At the Sunrise Market, Sally Joe said the secret to her family’s business success rests firmly in her father’s philosophy: “He doesn’t like to mark up (prices) very high. He would rather have more people come for lower prices.”

Leslie Joe opened the market about 50 years ago. Over the years, the small business has built up a strong client base that includes everyone from low-income locals to the Real Housewives of Vancouver, said Sally Joe.

Beyond the prices, the store’s relaxed attitude in the midst of sometimes chaotic crowds is key to its enduring popularity.

“Most of our employees, they are pretty much new immigrants. They don’t have any attitude or prejudice against one person or another,” said Sally Joe.